Welcome to the Chainlink Labs hiring process. Our interviews are fast, focused, and reciprocal—all held on Zoom to ensure speed and flexibility—giving you direct access to the leaders you’ll partner with. The process is tailored to your role and may evolve; we’ll keep you informed.
What to expect
Intro Call (30m)
Conversation with the recruiter of this role on your background, the role scope, and how our principles guide how we build.
Hiring Manager (30m)
Deep dive into your career trajectory, leadership philosophy, and alignment with team goals.
Team Interviews
Quick sessions with team members on your experience, industry knowledge, and project work.
Stakeholders (45m each)
Discussions with leaders you’ll collaborate with on Web3 expertise and leadership approach.
System Design Interview (45 minutes):
The scope of the discussion will involve building an app and integrating it with various systems from the ground up, while covering web3 fundamentals. The aim of this interview is to assess your capabilities in System Design in a web3 environment, understand how you think about tradeoffs, solutions to complex problems, and determine requirements. We'll be using a whiteboard tool to model the system architecture.
Web3 Bar Raiser (45m) - Case-by-Case Basis
Explores your fluency in the Web3 ecosystem — concepts, trends, and hands-on experience.
Alignment Interview (90m)
Conversation with a senior leader outside the team for a broader perspective on fit.
Take-Home Project + Presentation
Scoped project to complete within 7 days, followed by a 45-minute team presentation.
Final Interviews
Final Interview with Hiring Manager (30m)
In depth discussion of technical leadership capabilities, long term career trajectory, and strategic alignment at leadership level.
Executive Interview (30m)
You will be meeting with a member of the Executive Leadership Team. During this interview, you can expect to do a deep dive into your skills and experience as they assess to gauge for mutual fit within the company.
Closing
References, background check, and final recruiter check-in.
Job description
Director, Engineering CCIP
About the Role
Chainlink is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead the CCIP team, responsible for the operational excellence and expansion of infrastructure enabling secure communication across blockchain networks. This role exists to ensure mission-critical reliability, drive cross-chain growth, and build a high-performing team capable of operating systems where uptime and security directly impact user funds.
You will own production systems with 99.99%+ uptime requirements, lead a team of 30+ engineers, and balance the competing demands of reliability, velocity, and cross-chain expansion in adversarial environments.
Your Impact
- Build and develop a high-performing engineering team that operates with autonomy, ships reliably, and proactively identifies technical and operational risks
- Achieve and maintain 99.99%+ uptime for CCIP services across all supported chains through robust incident response, prevention systems, and operational discipline
- Drive cross-chain expansion by successfully onboarding new blockchain integrations while maintaining security standards and quality bar
- Define system architecture and engineering practices that ensure fault-tolerance, security, and long-term maintainability in financially consequential environments
- Reduce integration friction for developers through improved tooling, documentation, and support systems that enable ecosystem growth
- Lead major incident response and make difficult trade-off decisions under pressure with incomplete information
Requirements
- Managed engineering teams of 30+ people with a proven track record hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent in competitive markets
- Maintained mission-critical production systems (99.99%+ uptime) for 3+ years in financially consequential environments, including direct accountability for incident response and sustainability through growth
- Built or operated infrastructure coordinating across multiple blockchain networks or heterogeneous distributed systems, with hands-on understanding of cross-chain messaging, finality differences, and security boundaries
- Hands-on engineering background (3+ years) with technical depth in distributed systems architecture, consensus systems, message queuing, data pipelines, or infrastructure automation
- Operated in adversarial environments where system security directly impacts user funds, with demonstrated understanding of threat modeling and defense-in-depth
- Experience across multiple blockchain ecosystems (EVM, Cosmos, Solana, etc.) with understanding of their architectural differences and cross-chain coordination challenges
Preferred Requirements
- Clear commitment to blockchain infrastructure supported by crypto ownership, DeFi usage, and the ability to articulate why decentralized systems matter—planning to work in this space for 5+ years
- Built infrastructure or APIs consumed by external developers with deep understanding of developer experience, versioning, and backward compatibility
- Worked in hyper-growth environments (Series B+) where shipping quickly without breaking things is table stakes, balancing speed and quality pragmatically
- Led major incident command, post-mortems, and difficult security/reliability trade-offs at the organizational level
How to approach the conversation
Clarity matters
Answer directly and with focus. Precision is valued more than polish.
Depth over script
We’re interested in how you think and lead, not rehearsed examples. Expect the conversation to stretch into follow-ups.
Think out loud
Share your reasoning and trade-offs. The process is as important as the conclusion.
Dialogue, not Q&A
Come ready with questions about priorities, culture, and operating principles. We want to ensure alignment is mutual.
Before we meet
Explore who we are and how we build with the curated resources below and on our resources page, providing context for a thoughtful discussion.
Keynotes, case studies, and recent press about Chainlink:
Get a deeper understanding of the Chainlink platform and how it powers the verifiable web:
Why join us?
Our mission
Build decentralized systems that link everything to the truth, creating a fair, unbiased world.
Why join us?
Work with an A-team of industry experts, driving Chainlink’s growth at the forefront of blockchain. Boldness is essential here.
Key Principles alignment
We are proud of our collaborative culture. Be prepared to discuss how you align with our Key Principles:
Ownership
We apply high standards in our work and take complete, unconditional responsibility for all outcomes. We always go the extra mile when helping one another, our users, and our community and working toward achieving our objectives.
Focus
Prioritizing outcomes and avoiding the many distractions in our industry enables us to pay full attention to our objectives and achieve more in less time without wasting energy.
Dialogue
Chainlink Labs is an idea meritocracy. We seek to arrive at the truth about every situation through open, honest, and constructive dialogue. We avoid personal biases and ego and seek to overcome the fear of engaging in productive conflict to arrive at truth.